the TRIMERAL SYSTEM in BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMY - universala ...

mastered that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to call it
child’s play resembling the Lego-concept. To tell the truth,
automated registration (Rule2) is yet another and important factor
in the system, which we shall not enlarge upon here, since it
belongs to the world of computer software, but which constitutes
no principal complication in itself.
Ideally, the steering wheel — the Trimeral System 1 — should be
dealt with first. But since nothing can be described or
demonstrated without involving verbal means, the gear box, alias
the new vocabulary, must take precedence.
Do not panic, dear reader, it will not be absolutely necessary to
learn an entire new language, but only how to consult the
reference handbook compiled with its help: the International
Terminological Key (ITK) and, if desired for understanding the
meaning of a species name, an Esperanto dictionary. Certainly
this is infinitely easier than having to wrestle with convoluted Latin
declensions, conjugations, orthography, and even uncertain
semantics !
This ITK is a modest bilingual dictionary, listing over 5000
scientific word roots, adapted from Latin or Greek originals, in
which each root has both a fixed form and a fixed meaning, and
can therefore be easily linked to any other member of the group,
or be given an appropriate affix, also of a fixed form and fixed
meaning. Thus the old Latin and Greek stems are reincarnated,
so to speak, in a modern simplified and streamlined form. There
is no longer any need to worry about assimilative affix variations,
such as syn becoming sym, syr, syll, or even sy; or ad becoming
ac, af, ag, al, ap. No more wondering whether -us should not
rather be -um or -ae or -os. Consequently, practitioners in any
scientific discipline — not only biologists — which by tradition
happens to be embedded in those dead languages, can now
jettison their old burden.
The ITK table of scientific word stems can dispose of the
traditional intricacies of grammar, because it is embedded in a
1 The term trimeral ("three-membered") has been coined to avoid
confusion with trinominal (“three-named”).
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